My Opinion on Mages

Mages

I have been playing since Vanilla, I started off as a shadow priest and then in BC decided it was time to make a switch and I picked up a mage. The reason was they were a class that could pull their weight in dps, as during that time frame pures and hybrids where just that. The thinking on this has faded away so everyone is now more on an even playing field which is a good aspect of the game. I want to share my thoughts and concerns on the current situation of mages and the previous and upcoming changes.

FIRE MAGES

1. Fire has always been a spec that relied heavily on gear and RNG. I have never been able to say to my raid leader that I can do something on command each and every time as fire because unless you are smiled upon by the RNG gods. I don’t understand why a spec realizes so heavily on a crit multiplier for it damage. It is just not fun to be able to always be reliable in burst or the damage department.

2. MOP fire was in a good place, it might have been a little over powered with combustion and we can live with a combustion nerf, but a Critical Mass nerf as well really but this spec on the back burner. You really can’t time any of your trinket procs or have your pyro’s ready to line up solid ignites and combustions, I can go sometimes 7 to 12 casts without even getting a crit and I have gone as long as 15 without getting a crit, that means my dps goes into the toilet and really makes it difficult on some fights to pull your own weight. The problem I see is that we rely on numbers to much and not the actual game play of the mages, there are a select few mages around the world that do extremely high dps.

3. So the RNG factor of mages really hurt our game play and the constant nerfs and buffs really distract from the class itself.

ARCANE MAGES

1. Arcane was in a terrible spot when MOP hit, there was no way to be competitive with this spec, so you guys buffed it and I think it worked out pretty well, but now it is getting a nerf. The thing I see in any spec is to maximize the performance of your spec. Arcane has many thing that will go against us if these new nerfs come into effect. Arcane has no mobility, almost every fight in this game you have to move, you rarely get to stand still for any length of time. Right now we use scorch and arcane explosion for our movements. If we get a nerf to scorch, we have what Icy flows and arcane explosion for moving, you don’t want to use arcane barrage unless you have 6 stacks cause the dps will be a loss. We need something if we get a nerf to scorch a way to keep out stacks up and still do dps while moving.

2. Scorch weaving, I understand that mana management is key to this spec, but when we as a community find a way to maximize a spec it gets nerfed. The spec itself is lack luster in that you try to build up to 6 charges and barrage to clear them while just using missiles as they proc. It really isn’t a fun spec, with scorch weaving you have the ability to not always stay in the same rotation and you can have some mess-ups without it really tanking your dps. If you go below 80% mana your dps just plummets, so unless you can always pay attention to ur 6 stacks and clear them quickly you can really hamper your dps if you keep blasting, scorching allows for a little leeway in the spec than it would if you nerfed it. It also allows for procing missiles as well, so when you are fishing for some procs, it has a great benefit. Along with this goes back to moving, if you just do a 6 charge clear rotation, how does that work on movement fights, you have the potential to always lose your stacks before you get a chance to barrage or you will have to barrage early.

3. I think the spec itself if good, but increasing the mana cost of blast and scorch will hamper the spec, along with the nerf to RoP, but I will discuss that later on.

Frost

1. Frost has always been the spec for pvp since back in the day, since it has good control and good burst. The thing is that we have about 20 seconds of burst before we are pretty much just running for our lives for the next 2 minutes till our cool downs come up again. Frost is starting to look better, but the constant nerfs for the pvp side of the house keeps affecting the pve side of the house. The frost bomb nerf was good in pvp, but in pve it hurt a ton, there should have been a thought on how this nerf was going to affect both sides, instead make it have a less effect in pvp, than in pve.

2. Frost dps isn’t as good as most specs, the building of 3 frost charges as you switch targets doesn’t play well into the spec, I see there is a buff to this to allow your frostbolt to hit as if it had 3 charges, but all else will have to wait till you have 3 charges on it for it to hit at full power. I think that is good, but couldn’t we do something similar like arcane, where your charge have a cooldown but you keep them from target to target. I think as we go further you will adjust the frost numbers to come up, I really like how dynamic frost is in pve and how you can use the spec, but just right now it is not viable.

Talents

1. Our level 90 talents are in my opinion needs a little work, we have 3 talents that really don’t work really well in all the fights, it is all situation based with incanters ward only being viable on one fight which Is garalon, since you cannot predict how much damage you will take to ensure you proc the most out of that spell.

2. ROP seems to be ok, but now we are getting a mana reduction which will hamper arcane the most, since arcane relies on mana, it is just another nerf along with the other nerfs to arcane. It really doesn’t work well with fire, instead invocation works the best for that spec.

3. Invocation seems to be a hamper to always having to get out of combat for 6 seconds to get a buff on yourself. It just seems that these 3 talents weren’t really thought out well in the game play of a mage along with all the encounters that we have to deal with, I like them to a point, but they could use some adjustments.

Conclusion

1. I know you are always trying to balance each and every class, but I think as a mage we get look at a lot but tend to always get nerfs for various reason, from to much burst in pvp or combustion spreading is to overpowered etc. I think that we need a serious look at in terms of game play, don’t rely so much on the numbers but how the spec will interact with a group and the encounters. I am not saying we should be best on all fights, but we should be competitive without having always switch specs for each fight to find the one that best suits that situation.

2. Arcane In my eyes are good, even though you guys want us to manage our mana, we do to a point, we are just trying to maximize our movement and our uptime, without scorch weaving the spec is dual and lack luster and if you make a mistake it will be like cata, your dps will fall through the roof.

3. Fire relies too much on RNG, there shouldn’t be a spec that relies this heavily on RNG to do dps, in the current state we are unable to line up our trinket procs each time to ensure that we are bringing a good dps class to our raids. I think Critical Mass should be back to 1.5, leave combustion where it is at. I don’t want to wait till the end of an xpac to play fire again.

4. Frost is good, but the dps needs to be higher and a little less burst in pvp, so that everyone is having a good time, but we still are able to do our jobs.

Thanks for your time reading this post, this is my first one , but I felt compelled to speak up about the changes, most people ramble on in anger about the changes, I wanted to put my information out there to see if any of this information is meaningful for the upcoming changes.

Understandable, but I was putting it all together in one thread with my feeling, plus I posted it on blizzards website as well, to maybe get some replies from them as well.

Yes but people still tend to take it as 1 players word, and then some MVP comes and throws silly words and they have 2 conflicting opinions. And which do devs turn to? Ye abt that.. It aint really enough for single person to act alone, we need something that is made and backed by a full community and express it in a way that someone from Blizzard takes it as majority opinion from a that certain community. And how we might do that? Someone could say MVP's but try and convince 1 of them to read something and embrace it, I don't think it will happen. Now might be wrong here, but everything I've read coming from MVP's that is PvE mage related has been really bad.

You make some good points, but others are just nonsense. Critical mass was nerfed because it had to be nerfed either now, or later; fire scaled way too well. Fire and RNG are inseparable until they rebuild the spec from scratch and abandon the idea of hot streak; I doubt that'll happen anytime soon. Arcane's mana cost and reliance on RoP will even out with new tier's extra haste. Same idea as fire's nerfs, but done gradually over patches instead of all at once.

Originally Posted by Glimmerr

The frost bomb nerf was good in pvp, but in pve it hurt a ton, there should have been a thought on how this nerf was going to affect both sides, instead make it have a less effect in pvp, than in pve.

... A thought like: "Why the fuck would a frost mage detonate frost bomb early in PVE?" "They wouldn't, go ahead and nerf the glyph because no one in their right mind would do that." I question your experience with frost in PVE.

Originally Posted by LocNess

Lhivera is your class MVP. What he says goes. If he thinks Mages are fun (which he very much does) then there won't be any changes.

Forever amused that people think his word is law because they don't know what MVPs are.

You make some good points, but others are just nonsense. Critical mass was nerfed because it had to be nerfed either now, or later; fire scaled way too well. Fire and RNG are inseparable until they rebuild the spec from scratch and abandon the idea of hot streak; I doubt that'll happen anytime soon. Arcane's mana cost and reliance on RoP will even out with new tier's extra haste. Same idea as fire's nerfs, but done gradually over patches instead of all at once.

... A thought like: "Why the fuck would a frost mage detonate frost bomb early in PVE?" "They wouldn't, go ahead and nerf the glyph because no one in their right mind would do that." I question your experience with frost in PVE.

Forever amused that people think his word is law because they don't know what MVPs are.

I appreciate your opinion, the problem is we shouldn't have to wait to other teirs for our damage or our scaling to always even out, it just makes game plan terrible this tier. With frost bomb denotation, i used to use it on Elegon, to get proc's and such and it helps on other fights as well.

I don't play frost as much as i used to, but it is my second spec, since my main spec is arcane now, instead of fire, but I welcome all comments and proposals, as it is warrented an justified to get people thinking and working towards a common goal of mage sustainability not constant nerfs and buffs making us switch specs each time, because they done something over the top to mages.

I equate it to common law. They seem to listen to him despite the fact he doesn't actually raid and dragged his feet getting to 90.

His math is somewhat accurate, and he's got at least some amount of dev contact. I'm really not surprised what he calls for is in line with what Blizz does, as he's likely just repeating their own talking points, albeit ones that aren't made public. I think the cause and effect chain that people see is backwards to how it appears.

Originally Posted by Glimmerr

working towards a common goal of mage sustainability not constant nerfs and buffs making us switch specs each time, because they done something over the top to mages.

I agree to an extent. The problem is, with amazing scaling you end up like warriors do in most expansions. Crap in the first tier and god mode in the last one. It's a function of how this game works out, though. Balance has to be redone every patch. It's just that they were heavy handed in their initial patch, so it seemed harsh when they brought it down to sustainable. The problem of course is everyone then flocks to our other specs. It's a juggling game I don't envy them having to work on.

I find the main problem with fires reliance on RNG and the Nerf, is that it will balance out next tier.
That's fine for the people who are already geared to the teeth and experiencing how OP fire was, but for those that didn't have an Ilvl of 490+ (I believe) were hit very hard.

top guilds that are geared up were progressing fine, and still will. Lower geared guilds were managing, then got kicked in the face.
Imo the nerf was needed, but either A) should have waited till next tier when a larger portion of the mages would be suitably geared as to hurt the class like it has done or B) added some form of behind the scenes inverse scaling, so those with smaller levels of crit would still be half decent and those with more wouldn't be OP. was it the T3/4 hotstreak talents that used to do something similar? where by you got a larger bonus to crit at small levels, and a smaller bonus at high levels so it balanced out.

Well I posted it there as well, if they would like to take up the cause with us, it would be great, but I am just one voice in the mist trying to get heard. I just enjoy my mage, but I just enjoy what they do to us.